Perhaps the most interesting (though sort of irrelevant) part from a linked page on the site is that "cloud" storage is being sold as a one-time cost. A great deal (depending on price) if you ask me!
Pricing and charging for storage inside an organization is always ultimately a non-technical decision that has to balance who pays for it versus the consequences of it not being paid for. This is especially the case within organizations like universities, which have unusual funding and funding patterns (for instance, one time capex is usually much easier than guaranteed ongoing opex). We (the people providing the disk storage) know that there are ongoing costs to doing so, but the non-technical decision has been made to cover those costs in other ways than charging professors on a recurring basis.
Oh yes, I recall the fun of that, from many years ago.
One of my favorites remains when we were prototyping our next gen of servers for some compute next to quite a lot of disk. We had a prototype design, but we weren't done testing it, and someone needed a grant spent _now_, so they bought that design.
Unfortunately, that was the Dell R715/R815 family, which you may recall, had some...unique performance characteristics, so we didn't go with those for the final model, but had to deal with the support of them thereafter.
I have often wondered if you can come up with a one-time price for storage and guarantee that you’ll be able to store the data forever. Disks prices keep dropping so it should be in theory cheaper and cheaper to store data.
Perhaps the most interesting (though sort of irrelevant) part from a linked page on the site is that "cloud" storage is being sold as a one-time cost. A great deal (depending on price) if you ask me!